The US is destroying the last of its once vast arsenal of chemical weapons
In a confined space behind a shaft of armed guards and three rows of barbed wire at the Army’s Pueblo Chemical Depot in Colorado, a team of robotic arms was busy dismantling some of the last of the United States’ vast and horrific stockpile of chemical weapons.
It took in artillery shells filled with the deadly mustard agent the army had been stockpiling for more than 70 years. The bright yellow robots pierced each shell, emptied and washed it, then baked it at 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit. Out came inert and harmless scrap, which fell with a resounding clank from a conveyor belt into an ordinary brown dumpster.
“That’s the sound of a dying chemical weapon,” says Kingston Reif, who has pushed disarmament outside the government for years and is now deputy assistant secretary of defense for threat reduction and arms control. He smiled as another grenade fell into the dumpster.
The destruction of the stockpile has taken decades, and the military says the work is nearly done. The depot at Pueblo destroyed its last weapon in June; the remaining handful in another Kentucky depot will be destroyed in the coming days. And when they are gone, all publicly declared chemical weapons in the world will have been eliminated.
The American stockpile, built up over generations, was shocking in size: cluster bombs and land mines filled with nerve gas. Artillery shells that could cover entire forests in a blistering mustard mist. Tanks full of poison that could be loaded onto jets and sprayed at targets below.
They were a class of weapons deemed so inhumane that their use was condemned after World War I, yet the United States and other powers continued to develop and collect them. Some had deadlier versions of the chlorine and mustard drugs that had become notorious in the trenches of the Western Front. Others contain later developed nerve agents, such as VX and Sarin, which are lethal even in small amounts.
The United States armed forces are not known to have used lethal chemical weapons in combat since 1918, although they used herbicides such as Agent Orange during the Vietnam War that were harmful to humans.
The United States also once had an extensive germ warfare and biological weapons program; those weapons were destroyed in the 1970s.
The United States and the Soviet Union agreed in principle in 1989 to destroy their stockpiles of chemical weapons, and when the Senate ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention in 1997, the United States and other signatories pledged to end chemical weapons once and for all. to get weapons.
But destroying them wasn’t easy: they’re built to be fired, not dismantled. The combination of explosives and poison makes them extremely dangerous to handle.
Department of Defense officials once predicted that the job could be done in a few years at a cost of about $1.4 billion. It is now decades behind schedule, at a cost of nearly $42 billion — 2,900 percent over budget.
But it’s done.
“It’s been an ordeal, that’s for sure — I wondered if I’d ever live to see the day,” said Craig Williams, who began pushing for the safe destruction of the stockpile in 1984 when he learned that the Army had lost five tons stored chemical weapons. miles from his home, at the Blue Grass Army Depot near Richmond, Ky.
“We had to fight and it took a long time, but I think we can be very proud,” he said. “This is the first time worldwide that an entire class of weapons of mass destruction has been destroyed.”
Other powers have also destroyed their declared stockpiles: Britain in 2007, India in 2009, Russia in 2017. But Pentagon officials warn that chemical weapons have not been completely eradicated. A few countries never signed the treaty, and some countries, notably Russia, appear to have retained undeclared stocks.
Nor did the treaty end the use of chemical weapons by rogue states and terrorist groups. Forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad of Syria used chemical weapons in the country numerous times between 2013 and 2019. According to the IHS Conflict Monitor, a London-based intelligence and analysis service, Islamic State fighters at least used chemical weapons. 52 times in Iraq and Syria from 2014 to 2016.
The immense American stockpile and the decades-long effort to get rid of it are both a monument to human folly and a testament to human potential, say those involved. Part of the job took so long because citizens and lawmakers insisted that the work be done without endangering surrounding communities.
In late June, workers at the 15,000-acre Blue Grass depot carefully pulled fiberglass transport tubes containing Sarin-filled rockets from soil-covered concrete storage bunkers and took them to a series of buildings for processing.
Workers inside, wearing protective suits and gloves, X-rayed the tubes to see if the warheads inside were leaking, then sent them down a conveyor belt to their demise.
It was the last time people would ever handle the guns. From there, robots did the rest.
Chemical munitions all have essentially the same design: a thin-walled warhead filled with liquid agent and a small explosive charge to burst it open on the battlefield, leaving a haze of tiny droplets, mist, and vapor—the “poison gas” soldiers have feared from the Somme to the Tigris.
For generations, the U.S. military has vowed to only use chemical weapons in response to an enemy chemical attack — then set out to amass so many that no enemy would dare. By the 1960s, the United States had a top-secret network of factories and storage complexes around the world.
Little did the public know about how massive and deadly the stockpile had grown until a snowy spring morning in 1968, when 5,600 sheep died mysteriously on land adjacent to an Army testing ground in Utah.
Under pressure from Congress, military leaders acknowledged that the military had tested VX nearby, stored chemical weapons at facilities in eight states, and tested them in the open air at a number of locations, including a site 25 miles from Baltimore .
Once the public learned the scope of the program, the long road to destruction began.
At first, the military wanted to openly do what it had done secretly for years with obsolete chemical munitions: load them onto obsolete ships and then sink the ships at sea. But the public was furious.
Plan B was to burn the supplies in huge incinerators, but that plan also met with a wall of opposition.
Mr. Williams was a 36-year-old Vietnam War veteran and furniture maker in 1984 when Army officials announced that nerve gas would be burned at the Blue Grass depot.
“There were a lot of people asking questions about what would come out of the stack, and we didn’t get any answers,” he said.
Outraged, he and others organized opposition to the incinerators, lobbying lawmakers and enlisting experts who claimed the incinerators would spew toxins.
Incinerators in Alabama, Arkansas, Oregon and Utah, and one on Johnston Atoll in the Pacific, were used to destroy much of the stockpile, but activists blocked them in four other states.
Ordered by Congress to find another way, the Department of Defense developed new techniques to destroy chemical weapons without burning.
“We had to figure it out along the way,” says Walton Levi, a chemical engineer at the Pueblo Depot who began working in the field after college in 1987 and now plans to retire once the last round is destroyed.
At Pueblo, each shell is pierced by a robotic arm and the mustard agent contained within is sucked out. The shell is washed and baked to destroy any remaining traces. The mustard agent is diluted in hot water and then broken down by bacteria in a process similar to that used in sewage treatment plants.
It produces a residue that’s mostly just table salt, Mr. Levi said, but it’s laced with heavy metals that should be treated as hazardous waste.
“Bacteria are amazing,” said Mr. Levi as he watched as shells were destroyed during the final day of operations in Pueblo. “Find the right one and they’ll eat just about anything.”
The process is similar at the Blue Grass depot. Liquid nerve gases discharged from those warheads are mixed with water and caustic soda, then heated and stirred. The resulting liquid, called hydrolyzate, is trucked to a facility outside of Port Arthur, Tex. brought to where it is burned.
“It’s a good piece of history to have behind us,” said Candace M. Coyle, the Army project manager for the Blue Grass depot. “That’s the best part about it, is it won’t hurt anyone.”
Irene Kornelly, the chairman of the citizens’ advisory committee that has overseen the Pueblo trial for 30 years, has tracked nearly a million mustard shells being destroyed. Now 77, she stood leaning on a cane and craned her neck to watch the last one being demolished.
“Honestly, I never thought this day would come,” she said. “The military didn’t know if they could trust the people, and the people didn’t know if they could trust the military.”
She looked around at the beige factory buildings and the empty concrete storage bunkers on the Colorado prairie beyond. Nearby, a crowd of workers in overalls with emergency gas masks on their hips gathered to celebrate. The factory manager blew “The Final Countdown” on the PA and handed out red, white, and blue Bomb Pops.
Mrs. Kornelly smiled as she took it all in. The process had been smooth, safe and painstaking, she said, that many residents of the region had forgotten that it was going on.
“Most people today have no idea all this happened — they never had to worry about it,” she said. She paused, then added, “And I think that’s a good thing.”